FSSAI bars Everest and Laljee Godhoo from selling compounded hing

India's food regulator on Saturday stopped two of the country's best-known spice houses from selling compounded hing after laboratory tests found the products short of the raw resin the law requires.

The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India issued prohibition-of-sale orders against Everest Food Products Private Limited and Laljee Godhoo and Company, which sells under the LG brand. Both firms operate licensed units in Mumbai. The orders cover compounded asafoetida in powder and lump form and stay in force until further notice.

The legal standard is plain. Compounded hing must contain enough raw hing to leave at least 5 percent alcohol-soluble extract in the finished pack. That extract is the laboratory stand-in for the actual resin. One Everest sample returned 0.00 percent. Yellow hing powder from the same house tested at 3.29 percent. Black hing powder tested at 4.4 percent. The primary food laboratory classed the Everest samples as misbranded as well as sub-standard.

FSSAI said the numbers point to a shortfall of 30 to 40 percent in the raw hing that should have gone into the consumer packs. The agency also recorded non-compliance on the same alcoholic-extract test during routine surveillance, not only in the legal samples taken for this action.

At the LG unit, inspectors sampled finished compounded hing and six varieties of raw hing used as input. All six raw lots failed the starch test. The cap on starch in raw hing is 1 percent by weight. The laboratory found 15 to 32 percent. Raw hing is also required to hold a minimum 12 percent alcohol-soluble extract. The finished LG powder and lump samples were marked sub-standard and, in some cases, misbranded.

Starch in this setting is not a cooking note. It is a filler that stretches a scarce resin. Genuine asafoetida is the dried latex of Ferula plants grown mainly in Afghanistan and Iran. India imports the gum and compounds it with permitted flours and gums to make the kitchen powder sold as hing. When starch climbs and the alcohol extract collapses, the buyer is paying for less of the thing named on the label.

Both companies have been told to file an action plan that stops the practice and brings the licensed products back inside the Food Safety and Standards (Food Products and Food Additives) Regulations, 2011. Everest's egg curry masala, chicken masala and garam masala also drew non-compliance notes. Those three lines were not banned.

The hing orders landed on the same day FSSAI told the Supreme Court it would put a red hexagon on packs high in added fat, sugar or salt. Justice J.B. Pardiwala's bench had already criticised the delay on front-of-pack warnings. The hing action is a separate file, but it sits in the same week of regulatory activity.

Consumers who already hold the banned packs have no formal recall notice in the public statement. The prohibition is on sale. Retailers who keep the named hing on the shelf after Saturday's order are selling a product the regulator has taken off the legal market.

Hing is a daily ingredient in Gujarati, Rajasthani, South Indian and Jain kitchens, where it stands in for onion and garlic. The two brands sit in a large share of urban grocery racks. A prohibition that names them by company, not by a single batch code, will empty those racks until the firms prove the next lots meet the 5 percent extract floor and the 1 percent starch ceiling.

FSSAI collected the legal samples at the centrally licensed Mumbai plants. The prohibition therefore attaches to manufacture and sale from those licences, not to a single state inspector's shop raid. That is why the order is national in effect even though the paper was issued from the Mumbai office of the health ministry's information wing.

What happens next is documentary. The companies submit plans. The laboratory retests. The prohibition lifts only when the regulator says the products match the licence. Until then, the packs that failed the extract and starch tests are not for sale.